DIGITAL RIGHTS IN THE EDUCATIONAL FIELD - MECHANISMS FOR LICENSE VALIDATION

In digital rights management systems a distributor may distribute content licenses to final users in a way that may violate the distributor’s rights or agreement between the owner and distributor. The digital rights sharing becomes a critical issue in the digital rights management system (DRM). The traditional DRM system focuses mainly on the transfer of rights between the copyright holders and the users, and put less attention to the sharing of rights among users (Zhang, 2011). From a licensing perspective not only is necessary to ensure that rights are correctly assigned but also ensure that content usage is exercised by users in a specific domain respecting the conditions initially defined by the rights holder. Ensuring that the terms and conditions stated by content owners on the license are respected by the other participants of the value chain, such as distributors (eg. teachers) or consumers (eg. students) is a concern. Verifying if the terms and the conditions stated in the original license are respected in the child license and also verifying if the license is generated to users that are in a controlled domain is a possible way to control the rights transmission among participants in the content value chain.

In the educational field, a knowledge based content can be shared among teachers and students and reused. The roles played by participants are complex because sometimes they acts like distributors but sometimes acts like consumers. To grant rights to other participants the distributor must have the privilege to issue rights in a license and these rights must consider the usage the consumer must have. In MPEG-21 this can be done in several ways and one of that is related with the grant issue mechanisms ant the other is related with the delegation control mechanisms. One enables an authorized distributor with the privilege to issue usage licenses from a distribution license. The other enables users with the privilege to transmit rights to other users in controlled way. With these mechanisms is possible to control the issued license within the boundaries defined by the primary license which are inherited from the progenitor.

As part of the rights violation detection, it is necessary to validate these newly generated licenses against the redistribution license owned by the distributor. The emphasis of this paper is focused on mechanisms that are related to rights transmission based on MPEG-21 standard enabling the transmission of resources (content and keys) and related data across main players in content lifecycle in the educational domain. In this paper is described a DRM system -ARMS - that can enable content protection and control over rights transmission where the inheritance rights are preserved in the educational field.

A rights-sharing control mechanism based in MPEG-21 standard is described. This mechanism permits to augment the content control distribution on a domain (the institution educational domain) through the validation of the license to be delivered in the ARMS system. Our proposal, when applied in the educational domain, greatly increases the expressive power of author/owners digital rights management framework.